April 22.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Slavery in Australia
“...a disguised but unquestionable system of slavery.”
There were also others who fought for a better deal for the Aborigines including...Lieutenant Colonel E. F. Angelo. [He] took up the Aboriginal cause [and] suffered as a consequence.
Angelo had devoted his life to the military. In his youth he had fought in the Crimean War and subsequently served in India. He took up the position of commander of the voluntary army reserve, first in Tasmania and then in Western Australia, until he was appointed to the position of Government resident for the northern districts stationed at Roebourne, arriving in the small outpost late in 1885.
Angelo travelled north and...was deeply shocked by what he saw, writing to Governor Broome in April 1886 that the method of labour recruitment practised locally was 'a disguised but unquestionable system of slavery'. [1] He was distressed by the systematic brutality of the white employers, their disregard for the welfare of their workers and the arrogant self-confidence of the settlers. He informed the Governor about the activities of two well-known 'nigger catchers' [sic], who 'publicly advertised themselves to procure and put niggers on board [pearling luggers] at £5 a head for anybody, or shoot them for the government at half a crown a piece'. [2]
The Colonel found that there was little he could do to change the way things were done in the north given the complicity of the leading men in business, the professions and the magistracy and the tight bonds of community camaraderie. In a report to the governor in April 1886 he explained:
I have been warned repeatedly by persons of all classes of the community not to touch the 'Native Question' but to take matters at the 'North-West' as I find them. [3]
...By the end of 1886 he had seen enough of the north and applied for a transfer on the grounds that he could not serve in a colony where he was obliged to 'wink at a system of organized slavery'. [4]...When the Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Robert Herbert, read copies of the letters that Angelo had written to Governor Broome he wrote a brief, damning comment: 'This man is, I fear, mad'. Three months later the verdict was that Angelo had ruined his career by showing himself to have 'much heart but little head'. [5]
Quoted by Hunt, The Gribble affair, op. cit., p.70.
ibid., p.71.
Angelo to Broome, 10 April 1886, in Broome to Holland, 23 Oct. 1886, CO 18/207
Herbert, 28 Jan. 1887, comment on Broome to Holland, 23 Oct. 1886, CO 18/207.
Fuller, 22 Apr. 1887 on Broome to Holland, CO 18/208.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Whispering In Our Hearts, pp.159-161, 263 n.1, n.2, n.3, n.5 and 264 n.6.
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“...the colonial relationship, 'like slavery, is suffused with force'…”
The employment of Aborigines in the pastoral industry has often been described as slavery. [1] In 1992, Bill Thorpe offered a more sophisticated analysis, suggesting that it was 'a related but distinct form' of slavery, which he termed 'colonised labour'.[2] In the first instance, writes Thorpe, colonised labour derives from 'the seizure of a territory and its people by a major power ... in order to dominate and exploit the colonised territory and its people economically, politically and culturally'. …the colonial relationship, 'like slavery, is suffused with force'…
B Thorpe, 1992. 'Aboriginal employment and unemployment: colonised labour', in C William and B Thorpe, Beyond industrial sociology: the work of men and women. Sydney, p. 96.
Ibid. p. 98.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster, ‘Relations, co-existence and the colonisation of Aboriginal labour in the South Australian pastoral industry, 1860-1911, Aboriginal History, (Vol 24) 2000, pp. 3-4, n.16, n.17.